LAS News Archive

2011-05-01 - Philip Sarnecki never imagined he would have anything to do with an illegal poker tournament run by an Amish farmer in rural Indiana. Granted, the illegal tournament is pure fiction; it’s the central plot point of the recently released screwball comedy, ...

2011-05-01 - Just as the fall 2010 semester was winding down, junior Andrew McFadden got an email from a friend, alerting him to a video contest on campus. The challenge: Make a short film showing what the world might be like devoid of humanities and the arts. “When I first saw it, I thought, ‘Wow, I never...

2011-05-01 - Kenneth Suslick, a professor of chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was one of two U of I professors to receive Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships. He is among 180 award recipients selected from the almost 3,000 scientists, artists...

2011-05-01 - University of Illinois junior Justin Kopinsky’s studies in math and computer science and numerous qualifications have added up to equal one Barry M. Goldwater scholarship for 2010-2011. The scholarship—awarded to highly qualified sophomores and juniors in the fields of science, mathematics, and...

2011-05-01 - They were called “night commuters.” Thousands of children in Uganda would walk for miles every single night to reach the safety of the nearest town, where they could sleep with less risk of abduction. When daylight came, the children would hike back home, and the next night the search for safety...

2011-05-01 - Most people have trouble telling them apart, but bumble bees, honey bees, stingless bees, and solitary bees have home lives that are as different from one another as a monarch’s palace is from a hippy commune or a hermit’s cabin in the woods. A new study of these bees offers a first look at the...

2011-05-01 - You can now own a piece of the building that has schooled the last century of Illini. Bring home a slate tile from Lincoln Hall’s roof—and your donation will support student scholarships!Tile Engraved with Column I:$50 donation($20 goes to student scholarships and $30 covers the...

2011-05-01 - After a long winter you may shudder to hear this, but much learning remains to be done in the lands of ice and snow. Thanks to a budding partnership at the University of Illinois, however, that task is getting more exciting, and it leads through Sweden. Researchers and educators across campus are...

2011-04-01 - For some plants, it pays to be devoured. When certain herbs are eaten down to the ground, they re-grow even larger, producing significantly more biomass, flowers, fruits, and seeds than plants of the same species that were not eaten. Now, LAS researchers may know the reason why, for they...

2011-04-01 - May Berenbaum still recalls how people would come up to her and ask her to sign their “Bambi Berenbaum” collector card from the popular sci-fi television show The X-Files. Bambi Berenbaum was the gorgeous X-Files entomologist that Agent Mulder took a fancy to, and she just...

2011-04-01 - University of Illinois chemistry professor Ryan C. Bailey has been selected to receive a 2011 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.Bailey is one of 118 early career scientists and researchers from 54 colleges and universities...

2011-04-01 - It’s official. Coffee breaks can increase performance at work.Actually, any kind of brief break can improve concentration on tasks that require focused concentration, according to research from LAS psychology professor Alejandro Lleras. The...

2011-04-01 - Some 150 years after the Civil War erupted, the topic remains a charged topic even if the issues Americans fought over are long gone. Bruce Levine, professor of history and African American studies, says...

2011-04-01 - In Jules Verne’s 19th-century science-fiction classic, Journey to the Center of the Earth, explorers climb down volcanic tubes to reach the center of our planet. Along the way, they discover gigantic mushrooms and insects, a vast interior sea, and battling dinosaurs. Today, geophysicists...

2011-04-01 - Taking a 60 percent pay cut to move 14,000 miles to a place where lizards crawl into your refrigerator doesn’t exactly sound like a big break. And eight months after arriving in Vietnam, Emma Swift will admit that her new job has required some, well, cultural adjustment.Yet for someone developing a...

2011-03-01 - Christina Cheng stands on one of the coldest spots on Earth as she watches a large cylindrical trap being lowered through a hole in 20-foot-thick ice. She’s inside a heated fish hut in Antarctica, but far below her feet is the coldest water on the planet, with a nearly constant temperature of -1.9...

2011-03-01 - If you’ve sat through sex ed class in high school, you’ve heard it all before: A pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg implants in the lining of the uterus. But University of Illinois researchers have now figured out a key mechanism in this process—a finding that could help explain some forms of...

2011-03-01 - A University of Illinois mathematician has been elected a 2011 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Donald Burkholder, an emeritus professor of mathematics, was among 503 new fellows honored by their peers at the AAAS annual...

2011-03-01 - Every generation, it seems that someone in the older population looks around at the new crop of students and announces that we are in the midst of a writing crisis. But Gail Hawisher, director of the University of Illinois Center for Writing Studies, takes...

2011-03-01 - Researchers have determined the structure and mechanism of an enzyme that performs the crucial first step in the formation of cholesterol and a key virulence factor in staph bacteria.Chemists at the University of Illinois and collaborators in Taiwan...

2011-03-01 - When a massive earthquake shook Haiti to its core in January of 2010, it didn’t just unleash deadly geologic forces. The quake also unleashed the first cholera outbreak in decades, due to contaminated water in the wake of disaster. Aid has poured into Haiti, but one of the most unique forms of...

2011-03-01 - Each year the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences recognizes a handful of staff members and academic professionals for their outstanding contributions to the college and service to others. These individuals, who were nominated by members of the campus community, demonstrate excellence and enhance...

2011-02-01 - Who would have thought that your ability to obliterate a fortress in outer space could tell you something about your ability to learn? But it did just that in a recent University of Illinois study. Arthur Kramer, an LAS psychology professor and...

2011-02-01 - There have been only a few times in the last two weeks, as Egypt has erupted in protest, that Mohammad Khalil, a professor of religion at U of I, feared for his mother’s safety. The first time was when she drove into Cairo to retrieve medicine from her mother’s apartment near Tahrir Square, the...

2011-02-01 - Fear stimulates my imagination.—Advertising Executive Don Draper, Mad MenIn the battle over air freshener sales, it’s a matter of scents and cents. When the popular odor eliminator, Febreze, hit the marketplace in the late 1990s, there was one basic fragrance, says David Whipple, an LAS...